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. When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an

old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used to

hobble about the street of our village with the help of a stick. He

must have been getting on for eighty in the year 1807, earlier than

which date I suppose I can hardly remember him, for I was born in 1802.

A few white locks hung about his ears, his shoulders were bent and his

knees feeble, but he was still hale, and was much respected in our

little world of Paleham. His name was Pontifex.

His wife was said to be his master; I have been told she brought him a

little money, but it cannot have been much. She was a tall,

square-shouldered person (I have heard my father call her a Gothic

woman) who had insisted on being married to Mr Pontifex when he was

young and too good-natured to say nay to any woman who wooed him. The

pair had lived not unhappily together, for Mr Pontifex’s temper was

easy and he soon learned to bow before his wife’s more stormy moods.

Mr Pontifex was a carpenter by trade; he was also at one time parish

clerk; when I remember him, however, he had so far risen in life as to

be no longer compelled to work with his own hands. In his earlier days

he had taught himself to draw. I do not say he drew well, but it was

surprising he should draw as well as he did. My father, who took the

living of Paleham about the year 1797, became possessed of a good many

of old Mr Pontifex’s drawings, which were always of local subjects, and

so unaffectedly painstaking that they might have passed for the work of

some good early master. I remember them as hanging up framed and glazed

in the study at the Rectory, and tinted, as all else in the room was

tinted, with the green reflected from the fringe of ivy leaves that

grew around the windows. I wonder how they will actually cease and come

to an end as drawings, and into what new phases of being they will then

enter.

Not content with being an artist, Mr Pontifex must needs also be a

musician. He built the organ in the church with his own hands, and made

a smaller one which he kept in his own house. He could play as much as

he could draw, not very well according to professional standards, but

much better than could have been expected. I myself showed a taste for

music at an early age, and old Mr Pontifex on finding it out, as he

soon did, became partial to me in consequence.

It may be thought that with so many irons in the fire he could hardly

be a very thriving man, but this was not the case. His father had been

a day labourer, and he had himself begun life with no other capital

than his good sense and good constitution; now, however, there was a

goodly show of timber about his yard, and a look of solid comfort over

his whole establishment. Towards the close of the eighteenth century

and not long before my father came to Paleham, he had taken a farm of

about ninety acres, thus making a considerable rise in life. Along with

the farm there went an old-fashioned but comfortable house with a

charming garden and an orchard. The carpenter’s business was now

carried on in one of the outhouses that had once been part of some

conventual buildings, the remains of which could be seen in what was

called the Abbey Close. The house itself, embosomed in honeysuckles and

creeping roses, was an ornament to the whole village, nor were its

internal arrangements less exemplary than its outside was ornamental.

Report said that Mrs Pontifex starched the sheets for her best bed, and

I can well believe it.

How well do I remember her parlour half filled with the organ which her

husband had built, and scented with a withered apple or two from the

_pyrus japonica_ that grew outside the house; the picture of the prize

ox over the chimney-piece, which Mr Pontifex himself had painted; the

transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach upon a snowy

night, also by Mr Pontifex; the little old man and little old woman who

told the weather; the china shepherd and shepherdess; the jars of

feathery flowering grasses with a peacock’s feather or two among them

to set them off, and the china bowls full of dead rose leaves dried

with bay salt. All has long since vanished and become a memory, faded

but still fragrant to myself.

Nay, but her kitchen—and the glimpses into a cavernous cellar beyond

it, wherefrom came gleams from the pale surfaces of milk cans, or it

may be of the arms and face of a milkmaid skimming the cream; or again

her storeroom, where among other treasures she kept the famous lipsalve

which was one of her especial glories, and of which she would present a

shape yearly to those whom she delighted to honour. She wrote out the

recipe for this and gave it to my mother a year or two before she died,

but we could never make it as she did. When we were children she used

sometimes to send her respects to my mother, and ask leave for us to

come and take tea with her. Right well she used to ply us. As for her

temper, we never met such a delightful old lady in our lives; whatever

Mr Pontifex may have had to put up with, we had no cause for complaint,

and then Mr Pontifex would play to us upon the organ, and we would

stand round him open-mouthed and think him the most wonderfully clever

man that ever was born, except of course our papa.

Mrs Pontifex had no sense of humour, at least I can call to mind no

signs of this, but her husband had plenty of fun in him, though few

would have guessed it from his appearance. I remember my father once

sent me down to his workship to get some glue, and I happened to come

when old Pontifex was in the act of scolding his boy. He had got the

lad—a pudding-headed fellow—by the ear and was saying, “What? Lost

again—smothered o’ wit.” (I believe it was the boy who was himself

supposed to be a wandering soul, and who was thus addressed as lost.)

“Now, look here, my lad,” he continued, “some boys are born stupid, and

thou art one of them; some achieve stupidity—that’s thee again,

Jim—thou wast both born stupid and hast greatly increased thy

birthright—and some” (and here came a climax during which the boy’s

head and ear were swayed from side to side) “have stupidity thrust upon

them, which, if it please the Lord, shall not be thy case, my lad, for

I will thrust stupidity from thee, though I have to box thine ears in

doing so,” but I did not see that the old man really did box Jim’s

ears, or do more than pretend to frighten him, for the two understood

one another perfectly well. Another time I remember hearing him call

the village rat-catcher by saying, “Come hither, thou

three-days-and-three-nights, thou,” alluding, as I afterwards learned,

to the rat-catcher’s periods of intoxication; but I will tell no more

of such trifles. My father’s face would always brighten when old

Pontifex’s name was mentioned. “I tell you, Edward,” he would say to

me, “old Pontifex was not only an able man, but he was one of the very

ablest men that ever I knew.”

This was more than I as a young man was prepared to stand. “My dear

father,” I answered, “what did he do? He could draw a little, but could

he to save his life have got a picture into the Royal Academy

exhibition? He built two organs and could play the Minuet in _Samson_

on one and the March in _Scipio_ on the other; he was a good carpenter

and a bit of a wag; he was a good old fellow enough, but why make him

out so much abler than he was?”

“My boy,” returned my father, “you must not judge by the work, but by

the work in connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or Filippo

Lippi, think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition? Would a

single one of those frescoes we went to see when we were at Padua have

the remotest chance of being hung, if it were sent in for exhibition

now? Why, the Academy people would be so outraged that they would not

even write to poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his fresco away.

Phew!” continued he, waxing warm, “if old Pontifex had had Cromwell’s

chances he would have done all that Cromwell did, and have done it

better; if he had had Giotto’s chances he would have done all that

Giotto did, and done it no worse; as it was, he was a village

carpenter, and I will undertake to say he never scamped a job in the

whole course of his life.”

“But,” said I, “we cannot judge people with so many ‘ifs.’ If old

Pontifex had lived in Giotto’s time he might have been another Giotto,

but he did not live in Giotto’s time.”

“I tell you, Edward,” said my father with some severity, “we must judge

men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they

have it in them to do. If a man has done enough either in painting,

music or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in

an emergency he has done enough. It is not by what a man has actually

put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts which he has set down, so to

speak, upon the canvas of his life that I will judge him, but by what

he makes me feel that he felt and aimed at. If he has made me feel that

he felt those things to be loveable which I hold loveable myself I ask

no more; his grammar may have been imperfect, but still I have

understood him; he and I are _en rapport_; and I say again, Edward,

that old Pontifex was not only an able man, but one of the very ablest

men I ever knew.”

Against this there was no more to be said, and my sisters eyed me to

silence. Somehow or other my sisters always did eye me to silence when

I differed from my father.

“Talk of his successful son,” snorted my father, whom I had fairly

roused. “He is not fit to black his father’s boots. He has his

thousands of pounds a year, while his father had perhaps three thousand

shillings a year towards the end of his life. He _is_ a successful man;

but his father, hobbling about Paleham Street in his grey worsted

stockings, broad brimmed hat and brown swallow-tailed coat was worth a

hundred of George Pontifexes, for all his carriages and horses and the

airs he gives himself.”

“But yet,” he added, “George Pontifex is no fool either.” And this

brings us to the second generation of the Pontifex family with whom we

need concern ourselves.